The doves were moaning crying cooing calling
The doves were moaning crying cooing calling Inside their houses the people were moaning crying cooing calling A damp hot air A person shouldn’t be allowed to write a poem kept cool in a cake of conditioned air What are your opinions? A person might be proud of their opinions Like polishing ordinary rocks and collecting them in a box Some advice: Or not I take off the voice of a prophet I sink my opinions into the sea What sound is there now in the hot damp world? Some advice: Who cares say the shaggy globes of white clover Who cares sing the doves Who cares says the damp blunt air boiling with the odor of our choices
My new blue kitchen cabinets painted blue
My new blue kitchen cabinets painted blue Black countertops, black granite flecked with dirty starlight And saltillo tile from Saltillo, Mexico, baked, glazed earth and still some little imprints from the foot of a dog who passed probably 50 years ago When the earth had fewer dogs probably but more species, fewer people, but more thick forest, more dark trees and the webs strung between the trees, clumps of sticks pushed into nests with the vulnerable blue, white, or cream eggs inside, speckled, warm, the squirrels’ nests that contain two entrances that are also two exits, a burrow in the sky, warm and dry A bird singing with its narrow throat, its voice a slender stem The legs of the insects slender as stems The stems numerous and dense moving in quick ticks My thoughts numerous and dense Thickly sprouting, dumb Reading the APPENDIX TO THE JOURNALS OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF NEW ZEALAND. SESSION I., 1884 H.B. Sterndale to Hon. J. Vogel, “concerning the resources of the greater number of those islands of the Pacific upon which I have at any time resided or with which I have been engaged in trade” “Beginning with the dark hour just before dawn, the stars are shining with an intense brilliancy, reflected on the steel-bright surface of the calm lagoon. The sandy pathways seem like snow. The heavy forest of towering palms and banyans, interlocked with trailing vines, assumes weird and fantastic shapes, and shows a black outline against the clear blue sky; under their dark shadows twinkle innumerable points of light—the lamps of great glow-worms and luminous grubs.” ………….reading and relishing (as Sterndale was writing and relishing) the precise prose used to describe what could be plundered, what could be eaten, what could be taken, what could be converted into such a thing that it could be transformed (like melted tortoise shell or chopped and canned bêche-de-mer), shipped, sold and bought, several times over, until it found a temporary resting place, in an establishment or a home, with a creature in a far part of the world intent upon bringing what is lush, vibrant, and tasteful into her home
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Source : All These Houses Full of Opinions
